Apple has released iOS 7.1 beta for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch into the iOS Dev Center. The first beta of iOS 7.1 has a build number 11D5099e and it brings number of bug fixes and much needed performance enhancements. Hit the jump for a detailed overview of changes, release notes and iOS 7.1 download links for registered developers.
Among bug fixes and performance improvements, iOS 7.1 beta adds a tweaked closing animation in the pinch-to-close gesture for iPad. A few other changes include a new toggle for ‘dark keyboard’, an option to upload ‘burst mode photos’ to Photo Stream for iPhone 5s, Toggling ‘bold text’ no longer requires restarting your device, and a new ‘auto HRD mode’ also makes its way into iOS 7.1 beta.

iOS 7.1 beta is available for the following devices:

iPhone 5s, iPhone 5c, iPhone 5, iPhone 4S, iPhone 4

iPad Air, iPad mini, iPad 4, iPad 3, iPad 2 and iPad mini

iPod touch 5G

Apple release iOS 7.0.4 last week, and with the first beta of iOS 7.1 seeded to developers today, we should expect its public availability soon as well. Below you can find the direct links to download iOS 7.1 beta for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch but these links require a developers account.

As for any other new firmware release, jailbreakers should stay away from iOS 7.1 beta and wait for an official word from the team evad3rs, who are currently working of iOS 7 jailbreak.

Download iOS 7.1 Beta (Developers only)

Here are the direct download links to the iOS 7.1 beta firmware available in the iOS Dev Center. Please note that you must be a registered iOS developer in order to download the firmware from these links:

iOS 7.1 Release Notes

Here are the official release notes of iOS 7.1 beta:

iOS SDK 7.1 provides support for developing iOS apps, and it includes the complete set of Xcode tools, compilers, and frameworks for creating apps for iOS and OS X. These tools include the Xcode IDE and the Instruments analysis tool, among many others.

With this software you can develop apps for iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch running iOS 7. You can also test your apps using the included iOS Simulator, which supports iOS 7. iOS SDK 7.1 requires a Mac computer running OS X v10.8.4 (Mountain Lion) or later.

This version of iOS is intended for installation only on devices registered with the Apple Developer Program. Attempting to install this version of iOS in an unauthorized manner could put your device in an unusable state.

Previously, if the server-side closed an HTTP request with TCP FIN without sending any bytes of HTTP header or HTTP body, NSURLConnection would synthesize an empty HTTP/1.1 200 OK response. This is now fixed, and the request will result in an error instead of a successful load with a synthesized response.

Notes

A new compatibility behavior has been added to address an issue where some web servers would send the wrong Content-Length value for “Content-Encoding: gzip” content. Previously, NSURLConnection and NSURLSession would send a “network connection was lost” / NSURLErrorNetworkConnectionLost (-1005) error in this situation.

The compatibility behavior applies only if the Content-Length value exactly matches the expanded gzip’d content. It won’t apply for “off by 1” or similar miscounting.

Core Text

Fixed in iOS 7.1 beta

Previously, text drawn with CTFrameDraw did not correctly place lines to account for the paragraphSpacing attribute of NSParagraphStyle. This has been addressed in iOS 7.1 beta.

Crash Logs

Known Issue

Crash logs will not appear in Diagnostics & Usage Data in Settings. The logs will still be available when synced off the device.

GLKit

Fixed in iOS 7.1 beta

If loaded with GLKTextureLoader, pngcrush images that have alpha were not unpremultiplied.

High Precision Timers

Fixed in iOS 7.1 beta

When sleeping or waiting for extremely precise time intervals, timers were delayed by up to 1 millisecond.

iTunes

Known Issue

Loading an iTunes Match library (or your purchased music history) may take much longer than expected, especially on larger libraries. If your library does not sync right away, please wait 30 minutes and try to access it again.

If a UITextField or a UILabel that is baseline aligned with constraints has attributes that change after the constraints have been added, the layout may be incorrect. The exception to this is -setFont: on UILabel, which should work as expected.

Workaround: Avoid making changes in UITextField or UILabel after adding baseline-alignment constraints. If you must make changes, you should remove the constraints and then reapply them afterward. Note that this is a performance hit, so don’t do it unless it is necessary.

The backIndicatorTransitionMask from a storyboard or a xib will not be interpreted correctly at runtime.